


Crisis

by Thimblerig



Series: On the Decks of La Sirena [9]
Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Episode Tag, Episode: s01e07 Nepenthe, Gen, Spoilers, so much swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:42:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23086474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: Ch 1: this moment of stormCh 2: agnes
Relationships: Everybody/Agnes Jurati, La Sirena's Emergency Medical Hologram & Agnes Jurati, La Sirena's Emergency Medical Hologram & Cristóbal Rios, Raffi Musiker & Cristóbal Rios
Series: On the Decks of La Sirena [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634554
Comments: 40
Kudos: 73





	1. this moment of storm

**Author's Note:**

> // Author’s note: This deals with a really big spoiler from 1.07 Nepenthe. If you haven’t seen that episode, best to take a pass on this story, maybe.
> 
> ~  
> ~  
> ~
> 
> CW: Contains medical procedures, minor PTSD symptoms, the creeping existential dread that one's very mind and perceptions have been altered, and swearing.

Cris and Raffi had argued about a lot of things during the years of their acquaintance: who the cute sentient was going home with ('Did I mention she plays chess?' 'Hey, no, he’ll cook you breakfast in the morning and it’s so good…), cargoes and manifests ('Say it, Cris.' '… You were right about the wobbly-headed geisha dolls.'), the outcomes of sports matches, and each other’s choice in potable beverages.

Tonight, under the stark white lights of _La Sirena’s_ medical bay, by the shuddering body of Dr Agnes P. Jurati, they argued _viciously._

“You were supposed to _wheedle_ her, Raffi. Work her,” Cris said, trying to still the shaking woman, and turn her. _”Oh, Auntie Raffi, your kindness and cossetting stirred the hidden fastnesses of my heart,”_ he simpered, _“let me share with you my secrets._ That was your job. Not feeding her _fucking poison.”_

“It wasn’t me,” Raffi hissed, her tatterdemalion robe falling down her shoulders. “I didn’t give her anything but cake.” Her elegant, nervous hands were firm on Jurati’s head as the unconscious woman vomited again, leaving streaks of red on her mouth which Raffi wiped off, quick and gentle. “Airway’s clear,” she reported.

“Sure you didn’t give her any 'home cooking'?” he snarled, turning the little doctor back onto her back.

Raffi drew breath.

“If you’re _quite_ done bickering,” the EMH said, stepping between them with a hypospray in his left hand, “you might note the injection site on her neck.”

The humans paused.

“Uranium hydride,” the EMH continued, pressing his own hypospray against Jurati’s neck until it hissed. The little doctor’s shuddering eased slightly. “She had a used hypospray near her hand when I found her by the restricted medicine dispenser.”

“That’s -”

_”Concha su -”_

“I must say, I lay half of this on your head,” the Hologram continued prissily. “‘Don’t just blip in,’ you say; ‘I don’t like it,’ you say. ‘Oh, panic attacks aren’t an emergency so don’t bother me,’ you say, ‘and neither is hitting my head just a tiny bit, or murders, or -’”

“I never told you murders weren’t an emergency,” Cris said quietly.

Raffi bit her lip, still with her hands cradled around Agnes’s sweat-drenched head. “We checked the logs after Maddox.”

“But she’s a doctor -”

“ - and a master cyberneticist. If she could hack anything it’d be -”

“Go _dam_ mit!”

“Hey, what are you doing?”

The EMH was backing slowly away, his hands in the air. “I can’t trust my own mind,” he said.

Cris and Raffi shared a glance. As she scooped up the little doctor in her arms and hefted Jurati out of the biobed in which Maddox had died, Cris stepped up to the Hologram and backed him gently to the wall, hands on his shoulders.

“You got this.”

“No, I do not,” the EMH snapped. “If I let a murder pass by, if my programming could be violated to that extent… what else is faulty in here?”

“Take three deep breaths.”

The EMH rolled his eyes. “That’s for meat.”

“Do it anyway.”

The EMH huffed and complied, letting his photonic ribs expand and fall.

Then, “Options,” Cris ordered.

“Reboot me from the source code. It’s hardwired into the ship and unhackable.”

“That’s five years of memories, _hermano,_ no.”

“You ridiculous sentimentalist.”

“Besides, she could die while you’re coming back, nobody wants that. You can do this, Emil,” he said, sparing a moment for the Hologram’s barely acknowledged name.

The EMH hesitated.

“Two ‘Fleet-trained first-aiders in the room,” Cris said reassuringly, “talk us through it and we’ll check each step. You can do this. What did you just give her?”

“Anti-seizure medication. I think.”

Cris glanced at their patient. She lay still, her breath rasping. “Seems to have worked. What’s next?”

“... Potassium iodide, to protect the thyroid.”

Across the room, Raffi had already levered open the Emergency cupboard and retrieved an enormous manual from behind a row of flashlights. She paged rapidly through the onion-skin pages, found the dose, and reached into the tiered rows of stored drug ampules. Her hand paused.

“Scalpel, not axe,” Cris said quietly. Raffi plucked out a vial and inserted it into the hypospray. The hiss of it, of Agnes’s shuddering breaths, were very loud.

“Now a chelating agent,” the EMH said with studied calmness. “Prussian Blue - no! hydroxypyridinone.”

“Breathe,” Cris told the Hologram. Or himself. He blinked and a spattering of red showed suddenly on the glossy white wall of the Medical Bay. Cris turned his head, ignoring it. _Save what you can save,_ he heard his old Captain say. When he looked back the wall was white again.

“I’ll want a blood-sample, every hour. And…”

“I’m a universal donor,” Raffi said quietly, hands still rummaging methodically through the Emergency Cupboard.

The EMH hesitated.

“Just snakeleaf and liquor,” she said, retrieving an antique blood transfusion kit, its coiled tubing and steel needles sealed in pristine sterile packaging.

“I’ll take it.”

“See?” Cris said. “We got this.”

“And wash your hands!”

* * *

Later, all three of them perched on chairs and stared dubiously at a large viewscreen showing a magnified sample of Jurati’s blood.

“What the hell _is_ that?” Raffi breathed.

“Veridium,” the EMH answered.

Amid the seething ovals of Jurati’s normal blood, tiny specks were scattered, of a blue that shimmered between neon and oil-slick. As they watched, another speck flared brightly and turned black.

Cris frowned. “Is… the radiation _killing_ it?”

“I believe so,” said the EMH. He flicked a button and showed an earlier sample, swarming with blue.

“Clever girl, then.”

“So someone did get to her,” said Raffi, the corners of her mouth turning down.

“And you’re not being blackmailed.”

“... What?”

Cris waved a dismissive hand.

“And she never left _La Sirena.”_

“So they got to her on Earth.”

“I told you, Commodore Oh-”

“Enough with your Commodore Oh!” Cris snapped. “The day the Director of Starfleet Security is a Romulan agent is the day we are _completely_ and without hope of mercy fucking _fucked.”_

A bubbling laugh spilled out of Raffi. “You mean ‘normal’, then.”

Cris choked. “Yeah, I guess.”

A breath.

They peered at their patient, pale and haggard, but breathing steadily on her narrow cot.

“You know, if you’re ever being threatened through the Mystery Kid, you can just say, you know that, Raffi? Your kin is my kin.”

“Hell, I know that.” Raffi leaned back tiredly against the wall, closing her eyes. “‘Sfine. Gabe just hates me, is all.”

“Fucking fuck.”

“Normal.”

“Heeeey,” came a twangy voice from outside the Medical Bay. “I don’t wanna bother anyone,” said the Hospitality Hologram, “but there’s just a teensy bit of blood in this vomit I cleaned up and -” Steward’s voice trailed off as he took in the room. “Agnes!” he wailed.

Raffi rolled her eyes. “Are _all_ of you in love with her?”

“Eh. Navigation’s a bit iffy.”

“Fucking fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // I borrowed the line about the geisha dolls from _Firefly,_ just because.
> 
> // It caused me almost physical pain to use “flashlight” instead of “torch” but this is an American-made show, so.
> 
> // I did some basic research on treating radiation poisoning. The potassium iodide is to fill up the thyroid before it can soak up any radioactive iodine in the blood and get damaged. Hydroxypyridinone is a chelating agent - “sticky” molecules that grab onto the unwanted material and make it easier to excrete - which works on uranium, where Prussian Blue doesn’t. As of today, hydroxypyridinone is still experimental, though. (https://www.sciencealert.com/chinese-researchers-develop-a-chemical-that-pulls-uranium-from-mouse-bones-and-organs/amp) And, radiation does terrible things to red blood cells etc. hence the transfusion.
> 
> That Agnes went from exposure to vomiting so quickly is _really_ worrying.
> 
> // I borrowed the Emergency Navigational Hologram's discomfort with Agnes from "never stopped to think they might have lives beyond our lives" by transpapyrus.
> 
> EDIT:
> 
> I altered this slightly after I watched 1.08, from "What is that?" "I've no idea." -> "What is that?" "A veridium tracker."


	2. agnes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // My hand slipped.
> 
> // CW: Suicidal ideation. Discussion of mind control.

Agnes didn’t mean to kill herself; that wasn’t the point.

She’d calculated the uranium hydride with a semblance of care - enough to overload Commodore Oh’s _gift,_ almost certainly. Survivable? Well, possibly. It was just when it came down to it that Raffi and Cr- Captain Rios had been kind to her and in that moment of crisis, with the Snakehead sniffing their footsteps, she couldn’t let them be hurt. (Or made an engine of Picard’s destruction either - they would have hated that.)

Bruce was disposable, her old lover gone to dust for the greater good, and Agnes didn’t like what that said about her. But there it was. In the desolation to come Raffi and Rios would tread the stars a little longer because they had been kind.

No, Agnes hadn’t meant for the uranium hydride to kill her. She just didn’t care if it did.

* * *

Something is beeping - the nagging yelp of a battery-powered heart monitor - and in the distance, up high, Captain Rios is snarling, short and snappy as an irritable dog.

A warm hand strokes her hair and rubs gently across her forehead. When Agnes opens her eyes Raffi’s face hovers over her, infinitely gentle, with her tangled-straw braids dropping over her shoulders.

Agnes swallows dryly and makes herself look at the room, instead. The biobed where Bruce had died - been killed - is covered with a sheet like a resting corpse. The lights burn. A red cord twines from the crook of Agnes’s forearm, its needle attached to a port held on with neat strips of tape, and disappears up one loose sleeve of Raffi’s glorious robe. Agnes twitches her hand to pull at the needle but it is covered over by Raffi’s warm palm.

“Honey,” Raffi says, “you’ve been having some terrible dreams. So you just listen to the sound of my voice. They were only dreams. So listen to the sound of my voice and let the dreams go.”

She is lying, Agnes knows. But still her eyes close and she sleeps.

* * *

The restraints about her wrists are deeply padded over the steel, as insistently gentle as Cris’s hands had been, on her breasts, her hips, her inner thighs. And they’re pointless, if Agnes is let alone with the EMH.

Just three short words would drop him into Developer Mode, and after that… the bizarre spaghetti-tangle modifications Captain Rios pasted on might slow her down. A little. And then he would be hers.

(She feels a moment of terrified fondness for these foolish children, to keep a witch in chains and not stop up her mouth.)

The EMH putters with something on the work-table, his eyes turned away from her. Agnes swallows dryly and leaves him to his busywork. Finally, not looking up, he says, “Captain Rios tells me that you altered the criteria for my emergency overrides.”

Agnes says nothing.

“I am asking,” the EMH says, and stops. Then, “I am asking as a friend, did you do anything else to me.”

“No,” she croaks. She owes him that.

He will forgive her, she thinks, in time. _He can’t help it._ It’s written deep into his code along with the brilliance: the imperative to care for his patients. So she is silent to leave him the dignity of anger just a little longer, even as he turns and steps close to her, to feed her ice chips and moisten her lips, and smooth her sweaty hair back from her face.

“I am informed there may have been coercion involved,” the EMH says, stepping away and turning his back.

And it’s so much more complicated than that.

The vision Oh gave her returns, the circle in the desert and the - Oh’s face - and - _my mind to your mind_ \- the _burning_ and - _my thoughts to your_ -

The irritable beeping of the heart monitor picks up, wretched thing, and suddenly the EMH is looming over her, worried, and his hands touch her face and she _screams…_

The EMH jerks back, horrified, even as the heart monitor’s whine increases to a level Agnes distantly recognises as dangerous… Three short words and she would have to deal with absolutely _none_ of this anymore. Her mouth shapes the first even as he touches a hypospray to her neck and -

(darkness)


End file.
